The Last Protest Singer

Bruce Springsteen released his tenth number-one record in March. It rails against a system that screws the little guy. He's on tour, firing off angry new songs night after night. Is anyone listening? Or are they just there for the old stuff?

I was sorry when they stopped making Pontiacs. They were good only for cranking up the FM and shit-screaming music while peeling around looking for a place to smoke out. I learned to argue music in a Pontiac. I learned to love Bruce Springsteen songs there. I defended those songs by developing a sense that every word mattered. In a Pontiac, a rolling church with ashtrays in the door, his words became my earliest catechism in writing. My friends liked Rush, Genesis, Zeppelin, so we argued about them. This was FM, before tape decks, even. We never had a choice. But I used to wait it out, driving around until Bruce came on, a teenager trying to be a spirit in the night. All night.

There's too much music now, and probably too few elemental arguments. Fewer people want to go out for rides and listen to songs they didn't handpick themselves. No one argues another person's playlist. I still need to argue with the music — with the Boss, not that he ever hears me. I don't argue Nebraska, the dark 1982 acoustic suicide anthem. Not 1995's The Ghost of Tom Joad; there isn't a loose screw in it. Nor The Rising: sad stuff, pulled out in the dusty nights after 9/11, when Bruce had some biblical business to reckon. But there have been misses, and I'll pick those bones with him: Human Touch, the 1992 album recorded with an orphan band, bit it. Hard. And I don't care that Born in the U.S.A. sold more than twenty million copies and charted seven top-ten hits. I don't like a man who has at least five flawless albums getting away with anything less.

For instance, here are the first words of the title song on his newest album, Wrecking Ball, released in the Year of Our Lord 2012:

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I was raised outta steel here in the swamps of Jersey, some misty years ago.

The swamps of Jersey? Really? More mythology of that swallowed-up scrapyard? And "raised outta steel"? He's singing in the voice of the old Giants Stadium, I'm told, but even the egotism of the working-class persona gets ho-hum there. "Misty" in years? That's just cute. As dumb as this may be on my part, I can honestly say that this line almost kept me from listening to the rest of the album. That's just how I work.

Any Springsteen listener — by day bartender, banker, gardener, teacher, black-topper, key maker, lawyer, toll-booth repairman, waitress, retread expert, mathematician — really has to have faith that the words of the songs were truly chosen. After I heard him breathe the line "I don't give a damn for just the in-betweens" in the middle of "Badlands" thirty-four years ago, it became a motto for me. You think he used a rhyming dictionary for that one?

I did keep listening to Wrecking Ball, and past that first line it's an honest-to-Daniel protest album. Springsteen accosts banks for breaking the public trust. He declares compassion a national priority. He notes, as ever, the death of cities like the one I grew up in. Crushed and pissed-off narrators issue calls to burn and murder. It's the album of the year — forget Adele, forget Beyoncé, forget those Mumford & Sons — not because it sold, but because it sold (not splendidly, but strongly) in spite of what it asked for: a kind of anarchy in search of casting off the recent past. It's an album on which never forgetting is the only route to forgiveness.

The question being, Is anybody listening?

Before this year, the last time I saw the Boss was on television, during halftime at the 2009 Super Bowl, and he sang like he knew he was selling something. He said as much at the time, and I just tried to forget him. It proved pretty easy.

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Maybe that's why in the parking lot in Auburn Hills, Michigan, a dozen shows into his current tour, an hour and forty-five minutes before showtime, I feel reticent. This is the first show on a little tour I'm taking through the Rust Belt and then out west to California, watching Springsteen perform, trying to find out why people are there and whether it has anything to do with protest. Crowds of hooting yahoos sway toward the many entrances. Women slosh syrupy drinks in plastic glasses, men scratch up my rental with the buttons on their chinos. Every person I pass, I ask: You like the new album? None of them know it well, most haven't heard it, and three times I'm told to fuck myself.

But then I sack up and find myself inside. Next to me: a wiry-haired old guy wearing a hat that says HOCKEY, unshaven, smelling of black pepper, with a curled-up wrist, sporting well-used crutches. He claims he's seen every concert and sporting event at Auburn Hills for ten years by standing outside and asking people for an extra ticket. "Look at this seat," he says. "I want to write a book about it. About all the good seats I've had. I've seen a lot of history. Think how much. I'm gonna write the book."

"Call it The Mooch," I tell him.

Then he lists the troubles. His leg weeps constantly. He can't drive, and this keeps him living with his mother, who's coming to get him after the show.

He might just be a Bruce Springsteen song.

Minutes later, the band opens up with "We Take Care of Our Own," the biting, caustic song Springsteen unveiled when he was the opening act at the Grammys this year — the first person onstage, even before the Whitney Houston tributes. They follow that with that "Wrecking Ball," not offensive when played extremely loud, with a little bit of a marching pace. In the middle, I ask the Mooch what he thinks.

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"Sure, man. Tear it all down. That's what he's saying," he says. "I'm all for it. Whole fucking city, whole county. Just clear it out." He smashes his twisted fist into his good palm. "A wrecking ball makes a hell of a mess."

In seven concerts over two weeks, the Mooch is the only guy I talk to who gets that song. And he's only heard it once. He eliminates all of my issues with the lyrics.

I grew up in Rochester, New York, a smaller, less dead version of Detroit, an equally empty though eminently more beautiful, hilly, and architecturally significant city than Buffalo (the second city on my tour), which is basically a wilderness fort set up against no one. My father died in Albany (my third stop) four years ago, so I know that little burg, too. And then there was Cleveland (my fourth), which looks muscular and healthy against the rest of the Rust Belt. So I don't come from the world of Bruce Springsteen's early troubles. Engines, restlessness, dead-end jobs, parking lots, marauding fathers, all that tearing around in cars, escape. I had some small measure of it. But the discovery of Springsteen was sudden and quiet for me, born on a turntable while listening to Born to Run, mentally clicking on the line that opens up the first song like an illustration:

The screendoor slams, Mary's dress waves.

That, friends, is some real writing. Two elements, a sound and a movement. Six words: the scene complete — the back of the house, the yard, the driveway, the rooms upstairs, the flight of hope, and the hope of flight. Even, I have to say it, the girl's tits. I knew every word of "Thunder Road" within a day of buying the album. I had no idea then what it meant to case the promised land, though I have done it plenty since.

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By now, years later, I've watched swarms of men and women sing "Thunder Road" in concert after concert. When I was a young Pontiac-riding badass, I thought this singing phenomenon meant that we, Springsteen fans all, were a legion unto ourselves, that the very momentum of story set us apart as fans. Now I think maybe it just means what all his songs mean: that you're not alone in wanting something more and something better.

In March, around the time Wrecking Ball came out, Spring-steen gave the keynote speech at the SXSW music festival in Austin. He talked a lot about influences, going on at length about Eric Burdon and the Animals. He picked up a black Takamine acoustic guitar, picked a familiar riff, and sang some Animals lyrics, slowly:

In this dirty old part of the city where the sun refuses to shine

People tell me there ain't no sense in trying

My little girl you're so young and pretty

One thing I know is true

You'll be dead before your time is due

See my daddy in bed and dyin', see his hair turning gray

He's been working and slaving his life away

It's been work every day, just work every day

It's been work, work, work, work

We gotta get out of this place

If it's the last thing we ever do

We gotta get out of this place

Girl there's a better life for me and you

And then Springsteen opened his eyes, looked up, and said to the audience, "That's every song I've ever written."

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You can't get close enough to Springsteen. You can't ask him a question he hasn't been asked a thousand times. So I never have. But three times I've stood close enough to Springsteen to call him whatever name I wanted, each meeting a kind of dumb luck. Though there was plenty I wanted to say to him, all three times Bruce spoke to me.

In 1978, in the Rochester War Memorial arena, I nudged my way to the stage, the way the young and the skinny can. I was watching for security when a sweat-soaked twist of curly hair and smile reached over the edge of the stage to take a guitar from a roadie. It was him, and he shouted right at me as he knelt, sounding for all the world like a leprechaun: "It's a fine night, just a fine night. You know?"

I knew how old I was, which is to say younger than he. But all I could think was: He's a kid. And I thought, My God, he's been at it so long. He had "Rosalita" and Born to Run and the covers of Time and Newsweek under his belt by that point, and he was touring for Darkness on the Edge of Town. I remember thinking: I gotta get to work. What I didn't think was: Bruce spoke to me.

It just didn't surprise me. Onstage, Springsteen speaks to you all the time. Right in your ear. It has always felt to me like he's standing right in front of all of us, barking into the megaphone of his choosing.

Thirty-four years later, this is the central covenant of the Wrecking Ball tour, the entire performance: I will speak to you. We will sing.

Albany. I face a massive preshow populous ringing the arena, jammed into $300 jeans or duded up in shitty T-shirts and scrappy ball hats, layered in midsummer tans. Not many are here for Wrecking Ball, that I can tell. Some are just collecting ticket stubs, picking up a T-shirt, laying claim to "Brilliant Disguise" or "Spirit in the Night," each trapped in their very own year of the Springsteen Chinese calendar.

"I like that one," the husband says. He starts to sing it. As do the people in line around him.

"You were born in Lebanon, that's why," his wife says, punching his arm.

"Born in the U.S.A.!" he wails.

People get one another going. A woman shows me where Nils Lofgren once signed her hip. In Cleveland, in an upscale cocktail bar, where bankers surely brought baskets full of death to their hometown over the decade just past, a woman shows me a picture of a coconut, which she claims fell from a tree at the house Springsteen owns in Florida. In each city I see the same guy selling the chance to pose next to a large poster that reads SPRINGSTEEN FOR PRESIDENT.

Inside, the hunger for the old numbers, so prevalent in the sugary cocktail twilight surrounding the venues, doesn't faze Springsteen. He seems to play old songs because he likes them, because of what they do for people, because he can walk people through Wrecking Ball before he gets to them. He concedes that he's a rich guitar player who doesn't need help. He lays out that he wrote these songs because there was "no discernible sense of anger" among the people of America. He hints at the obvious sarcasm of "We Take Care of Our Own" (sarcasm that the Democratic National Committee may or may not have understood when it blasted the salty tongue-in-cheeker as soon as President Obama finished his convention speech in September). Each night, the crowd hangs on through the new material. Bruce queries their anger. He turns to his band, new members and old, temporary and permanent, to drive the songs to the pitch of ire he demands.

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Bruce Springsteen could connect to an empty canyon. He alienates no one. Not the young, who missed what he once was; not the hardcore; not the dismissive. He can motivate, shake up, urge, give respite. He preens on the stage, he ranges. He squeals a little in his zeal, in a little bit of James Brown.

The roots of a tent revival aren't masked. Such is the calling of a soul man, emergent when needed. And he is needed now. Springsteen — anything but old while under his own spell — is a boot-stamping preacher, reminding people to "hold tight to your anger," "find the bastards and shoot 'em on sight," to keep "trudging through the dark in a world gone wrong," to see that "sometimes tomorrow comes soaked in treasure and blood." This is today; lines plucked straight from the new album. And in Albany, the crowd shouts out, with Springsteen leading the charge, "Death to My Hometown" — the album's Irish boot-in-the-face screed about what bankers brought upon us all. They brought death to our hometown, boys. Death to our hometown. You watch this enough nights and you think: Yeah, they must be listening. They sing it. They smack the floor with their heels and, for a moment, they hear.

The second time Springsteen spoke to me was in Indianapolis in 2002, when I was old enough to know better. I hadn't seen him in more than ten years, and I spent the afternoon baking brownies laced with too much expensive weed. When we took the floor, my friends started passing out like the bunch of overly stoned dinks they were. Nothing all that wrong, just too high. But this was right after 9/11, and the cops, fearing dirty bombs of anthrax, blazed in when they saw us collapsing. The show was delayed. My entire group was whisked away on gurneys, whispering cover stories all the way to the makeshift clinic behind the stage, where we just kept telling the nurses: Oysters. It was oysters at the bar before the show.

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Springsteen himself came around a corner, headed toward the stage, while I was in the hall talking to a cop. He'd heard about our emergency, of course. "Everybody all right in there?" he said. I pursed my cottonmouthed lips and gave him a nod. A cop answered that it was under control. He used the word: oysters. "We got good seats for you," Springsteen said. "They'll take you up."

I swear Springsteen kept mouthing the word oysters at us during the show, which terrified me because I was ginormously high. And again, I said nothing in return. I never told anyone in the group that he'd spoken to me at all.

I was talking to my lawyer the next morning. He advised me to lay off the dope. "You know, Bruce doesn't do drugs," he told me, which I already knew. Then I told the lawyer what he already knew: "Bruce is a lot smarter than most of us."

In Albany, I watch the show with an old friend, a guy I've known since I was a kid. This guy has tossed through some jobs these past few years: real estate, sales, bit work — deliveries, repairs. Six months ago, he snagged a midlevel government job and he's held tight ever since. "Work," he says while we drink before the show. "You gotta love work." But times had been bad before this, he says. At one point, he took a paper route for extra money. He had to be up at 3:20 every morning to load his van. By the time he got home, his kids were getting up for breakfast.

There is a song on the album about a guy like him, a guy who takes what work he can get, to get his family by. "It's you," I say. "You're the hero of that song." And even though the moment falls sharp and awkward in the bar, I backhand him in the chest later, when Springsteen starts singing "Jack of All Trades." It starts gently, with the work one man is willing to do, knows how to do:

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I'll mow your lawn, clean the leaves out your drain

I'll mend your roof, to keep out the rain

What a jerk. Me. I can't raise my eyes to meet my friend's, so I pretend to listen to Springsteen, who sings the song by himself, under a single spot. Why had I thought this song, sung with both resignation and resolve above an eerily plodding rhythm, would be any kind of comfort to my friend? Had I forgotten how private the realizations of Springsteen are? My friend says nothing. And then it happens: The song turns from the imagistic and voicey keenings of an out-of-work roofer to a simmering, confident anger that, earlier this very week, had seemed wholly out of kilter to me:

If I had me a gun, I'd find the bastards and shoot 'em on sight

I'm a jack of all trades, we'll be all right

The song finishes soon after. My friend gives away nothing, acts as if I'd never made the suggestion to listen close to the anger in this particular song. But then he nods his head, as if he doesn't like anything at all very much just then. "Fuckin' A," he says, which I take as proof that he heard the man: You're not alone.

The last time he speaks to me, I can't hear what Springsteen says. He is on his back, riding the fingertips of a dozen Buffalonians, maybe more, crowd-surfing — sixty-two-year-old man — above the floor in a hockey arena. I'm alone, but I'm in a throng. He seems a floating corpus coming straight at me, so I reach up with both hands, a beer in one. I'm touching him now. Then Bruce Springsteen knocks the beer from my hand, so it flips and falls right on top of my head. It feels good. It makes him laugh, and he shouts something to me.

He's misty in years, riding the hands of the unknown mass, floating across the all of us. On the big screen high above, the scene looks predictably like a crucifixion played out whilst riding the air. But there is no anger, no shred of fear. This is more than three quarters of the way through the evening's proceedings — more than two hours gone, more than an hour to go. The man, the Boss, has done his level best, as always, to make the crowd feel what he feels — a rollicking elation, a well-earned exhaustion, and a good bit of righteous anger. By then I remember everything I might sing now, after all this. Yeah, I'll burn it. I'll race it. I'll tear it down. I'll go looking for more. I'll wreck it all. Whatever Bruce says. Still.

Yes, he spoke to me. I couldn't hear at first. I held a hand to my ear — say again? He says, "I owe you one." He floats off, but I can hear those very words. I will hold him to them. I always have.

Fenway Park in Boston, August 15. Springsteen played sixty songs over two nights, thirteen from the new record.

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